Follow the River (28 page)

“Tell y’ what I fear,” Mary said. “That afore this day’s done, them hunters will look down an’ see our tracks a-comin’
thisaway, an’ send somebody back here t’ see who we be. That’s what I fear as much as meetin’ more savages headlong.”

Ghetel considered this, nodding and running her tongue thoughtfully over her back gums with elaborate ruminating movements of her lower jaw. Finally she announced: “Ven I vatch to th’ back, you vatch to th’ front. My turn to ride now, eh?”

“Aye.”

“Get me a place to climb up, den.”

And when Mary led the mare alongside a fallen log Ghetel could use as a mounting block, the old woman hoisted her broad bony rump onto the horse’s back as if she were getting onto a sidesaddle. Then, to Mary’s astonishment and amusement, she raised her left leg, instead of her right, and lowered it over the other side so that she was astraddle but backward, looking over the horse’s rump. She turned and looked down at Mary. “Now ve go,” she said, “and I see ’em if they follow.”

Mary stared at her for a moment, mouth hanging open, then shook her head. “So be it!” She laughed. “Hang on!”

And so they continued, up an Indian trail through the blazing fall foliage in the valley of the beautiful river, keeping a vigil fore and aft.

Their great fortune in obtaining the horse seemed also to have extended to the weather. For three days they were blessed with mild, dry, southerly winds, sun-gilded, fleecy clouds cruising across a pearly blue sky. The wind soughed high in the trees above them, sent shivers across the surface of the river and stripped off the first loose leaves of autumn. A
gust would boom in the crowns of the towering hardwoods; leaves would spill off and whirl away like yellow snowstorms. Deep drifts of ochre and orange and crimson leaves deepened on the forest floor, fragrant and crisp and easy underfoot. Docile wasps and weary flies stitched leisurely through slanting sunbeams. Mary and Ghetel went on through this dry, balmy weather, taking turns riding and leading the mare, wading and limping through the rustling leaves, carrying their homemade lances upraised, like a pair of tatterdemalion remnants of some Amazonian cavalry. Mary sang her little homing ballad often as they went along. Ghetel had abandoned her retrospective mode of riding the first time the mare lunged roughly up a bluff and there was no mane to hang onto. The nights were dry and cool but not cold. Their supply of corn dwindled slowly, more slowly certainly than if they had dared to kindle a fire to cook it in any manner. Drying on the cob day by day, it made a gritty and starchy meal, almost like eating chalk, so they did not eat as much as they would have if it were more palatable. The few handfuls of berries, walnuts, wild grapes and persimmons they found each day were a wondeful relief. Because of her lack of molars, Ghetel had to find some way to crack and pulverize her corn, and usually smashed it with the blunt side of the tomahawk on a rock until she had a small dirty pile of yellow-white grit that she could wash down with water. She ingested a fair amount of dirt and stone dust to this primitive milling process. Mary’s own teeth were beginning to ache and loosen because of their wretched diet, and she would have strange twinges and itches in her gums, and could suck a taste of rot from between her grinding-teeth. But at least the corn had bound up their flux, and both privately took satisfaction in the little hard stools they left behind every morning.

Mary estimated that they were covering twice as much distance each day as they had before acquiring the wonderful animal, partly because the horse could carry them both across creek mouths and shallow rivers they would have been afraid to wade on foot. The mare was a good forder, not skittish at entering water, and would with good footing make her way across a strong current as high as her withers, with
the two women astride her, the water reaching their hips, Mary clutching the mane, Ghetel embracing Mary’s scrawny waist. And when the mare would clamber out on the far bank, both the women would fuss over her, hug her neck, kiss her muzzle, stroke her throatlatch, hand-feed her a little corn and perhaps let her rest and graze if they were in grassy country. Mary had always loved horses, but never had she loved one with the same choking, tear-starting love she felt for this benevolent lovely beast that had appeared in her life when she had so desperately needed it. Sometimes she would look into the deep brown, soft-lashed eyes and would feel a rush of appreciation that felt almost like a prayer. “Ah, God,” she exclaimed once, “would that people could be so good!”

But sometimes that kind of communion could devastate her soul, because into that same rich upwelling of emotion the images of her three lost children would rush, as if through a gate suddenly left unguarded.

On their third day with the horse, they came to a sandy-bottomed tributary that Mary distinctly remembered from the trip down in the captivity of Captain Wildcat. The Indians had crossed it in a canoe and had secreted the vessel in a canebrake on this shore. “Wait,” she said, and leaving Ghetel with the horse, pushed her way into the tall, waving yellow-green stalks, holding her hickory lance in front of her, both to part the reeds and to be ready in case she should come upon a water moccasin—or an Indian. She waded through the muck searching for the outline of a canoe.

A loud splash a few feet in front of her made her recoil and break out in a cold sweat, and she stood with thudding heart until she decided that she had only startled a sunning bullfrog. She crept farther into this world of black mud and shimmering vertical lines, her shoes filling with cold water, but found no sign of a canoe. Eh, well, she thought. Likely some outbound party’s left it on t’other shore. As she started to run back, her eye caught a glistening dark lump in the shallows almost at her feet; it was pulsating.

It was a huge bullfrog, half-submerged, gathering itself to leap away.

With a quick, desperate stab of her spear she impaled it. She turned her face from its sudden awful thrashing and squirming and waited until it was still.

“May-ry?
May-ry
?” the old woman had begun querying, when Mary emerged from the brake proudly holding up her stick with the limp frog on the end of it.

“Look, Ghetel. Look. Our first meat.”

They twisted its big legs off and slid the slimy skin off as if pulling off stockings, and hunkered there on the river bank like a pair of aborigines, gnawing at the cold raw pink-white meat. Mary glanced up once from her own bone-picking and saw a string of slobber running from Ghetel’s underlip as she threw away her frogleg bones and started examining the rest of the frog.

When Ghetel reached for it and began pulling off its tiny little arms, Mary had to look away.

Something about the look of Ghetel’s hunger had sent a cold bolt of unnameable horror through her.

They went five miles up the west bank of that river, stumbling through ravines and forcing their way through thickets and brambles that cut and lashed their skin and further shredded their rags, before finding a shallows of sand and gravel bottom where they could ride the mare across. Then they returned down the east bank. Here they had to lead the horse and walk through a vast tangle of grapevines and thorny locusts. There were a few leathery, hard, wrinkled grapes within reach, but obviously their season was past and they were no pleasure to eat. Nonetheless, the women gathered a few bunches and slipped them into the blanket bundles with their remaining corn. They were certain that there would come a time when even these would taste good.

They were smeared with their own blood when they struggled at last out of the thorn ticket. They rinsed their limbs with river water, dug little black thorn-ends out of their wounds and continued downstream toward the O-y-o. Almost immediately they came to a creek mouth no more than knee-deep but strewn for yards with mossy, flat, sharp-edged rocks the size of dinner plates and tabletops, which tilted and slid
and turned under their feet. By the time they had teetered and crashed across these to the other side, their rotten shoes had finished falling apart, and they were forced to abandon them and continue down the shore on bare, bloody feet that felt as if every bone in them had been fractured. They minced and winced at the stabs of twigs and stones in their soles, until their tender feet were at last so full of throbbing pains that new jabs could scarcely be felt. They took turns riding, but it seemed their feet hurt even worse hanging free beside the horse’s ribs than when they were being walked on.

And, even more alarming, the mare herself was limping since the passage over the rocks. Mary examined her and found oozing abrasions, one on the pastern of her left foreleg and one under her right hind fetlock—very critical places, Mary knew, which could render her lame and useless if they were unlucky.

So the women both dismounted and walked. They stopped for the day at midafternoon when the O-y-o came in view.

Here they retied the neck halter into a hobble and set the mare to grazing. Mary limped about for a while looking for comfrey to make dressings for their feet and the mare’s legs, but found none and presumed that the season for finding it was now past. With little certainty, then, she decided to dredge up some muck from the river’s edge and put it on the mare’s wounds, feeling that this would at least sooth them. While stooping there she saw a long dark shape lying among the reeds—a rotting log, she thought at first—which closer examination revealed to be a ruined Indian canoe, half-sunk in the shallows, with slabs of its bark cover fallen away from its hickory frame. This only reminded her that their entire route followed well-used Indian trails, and that there could be no carelessness or excessive noise. And though she yearned for the comfort of a campfire, for hot water to heal their feet, and she probably could have started one even without flint and steel—she had watched squaws at the Shawnee town ignite tinder with an easily made bow-and-drill device—it would be foolhardy in the extreme to do it.

She packed the cool black muck on the horse’s fetlock and pastern while Ghetel sat nearby, watching with an approving
look while mashing corn and wild grapes together on a flat rock with the tomahawk. They added a handful of water to the meal later and made it into a purple paste that, while strange and awful to the palate, was certain to be nourishing, and did extend their little store of corn somewhat.

Each time they arose to move about their camp, flashes of pain shot up from their battered feet. Mary remembered then the thoughts she had had so recently about Will, about their very personal attention to each other’s feet. She looked at the poor hag beside her, at her wrinkled, scratched skin hanging like wattles off her arms, and suddenly was drawn out of herself by a great tug of pity. “Come, Ghetel,” she said.

And then for an hour as the late afternoon sun warmed their faces, they sat at the river’s edge, and Mary kneaded and palpated the old woman’s misshapen feet, those bundles of bones and calluses and knobby joints, with the rich mud, while Ghetel groaned deep with pain and delight. Mary talked of Will as she tended the old woman’s feet, and now and then tears would run off the end of her nose.

Ghetel worked on Mary’s feet then, and talked to her about old Holland, whence she had come twenty years ago, “when I vas gutluckink like you,” and about great kitchens she had known, with copper pots and ladles and sausages hanging from the rafters, and cheeses maturing in cloth, and butter in the churns, and big porcelain ovens fragrant with new bread, until Mary was driven to exclaim:

“Have mercy! Y’re caressin’ me at one end an’ torturin’ me at t’other!”

* * *

Their feet gave them agony the next morning when they first put their weight on them, but as they limbered with the walking, the pain lessened to a healthy ache and it became apparent that they really were very much better.

Neither of them rode the horse that morning, but walked and led her and studied her gait. She did not limp, and did not start limping as the day wore on, so they presumed that the mud had done as much good for her as for them. “We like as not can ride ’er tomorrow,” Mary said.

They went eastward all that morning, seeing no sign of Indians and finding nothing but a fall of acorns to supplement their dwindling corn. At midday their course began to veer southeasterly, and Mary went back over the mental library of landscapes. As she recollected, there were still three major river mouths to be crossed before they would reach the great northeasterly curve in the O-y-o’s rivercourse and find the place, that pleasant point, where the waters of the New River flowed into the O-y-o. P’raps seventy or eighty miles to that place, she thought. But it could add up to two hundred if them three rivers ’twixt here and there detour as much.

Their good weather gave out at midday. A sudden chill blasted over the river valley, sending millions of leaves spinning away in red and yellow whirlwinds, buffeting the tree-tops with an intimidating rush and moan. Iron-gray clouds came scudding over low, dragging their dirty-looking skirts over the hilltops, and in five minutes the river was flint-colored and seething with whitecaps. Chilly gusts blew the women’s hair over their faces and flattened it against their scalps, and the air around them was full of spinning leaves and twigs. Their rags flapped and fluttered around them and they inched along squinting, staying close in the lee of the mare. And soon their skin—most of it exposed now by the disintegration of their clothes—was being pelted by cold, driven raindrops that stung like sleet. The wind increased, so cold and powerful it seemed to suck out their breath. An enormous dead beech tree gave up its foothold on the slope a few yards above them and crashed to the ground, splitting and splintering smaller trees as it bore them to earth. The mare shied, reared and bolted. Mary hung onto its neck bridle through ten awful seconds, her feet hardly touching the ground, until she dragged the beast to a nervous, snorting standstill fifty yards farther on. Ghetel, emitting little yelps into the wind, came running to catch up, with that strange, arm-pumping trot that had carried her through the gauntlet.